The vision of a Madonna under Cuban cigar butts;

 ''She's an actress, for God's sake (.)'', I thought to myself, away from home on a fact-checking mission. Everything Alice had said on television last night had to do with her feelings for me, how happy we had been and how our marriage had been shaken by my ''perfidious communism''. An actress: when she started to cry, I couldn't believe my eyes. Anonymous through the cast-iron architecture of SoHo. Fifty 19th-century iron buildings on five cobblestone streets. Between Broone and Spring Street, the longest such sequence in the world. Walking anonymously through the bustling polis that had absorbed my name in the imminence of the new government acts, I looked in the newspapers for news about the widespread disapproval of my person. In the inner pages, there were sometimes bulletins from the capital ---- as far away as Rome from Amsterdam, as the Copernicus Crater from the Locus Somniorum. In the only interview I gave after I was released from prison, I made it clear that everything was going swimmingly between Alice and me now. Mutual love and approval were restored without a scratch. But every time I tried to smile at Alice with that sticky smile stuck to my face, she would look at her with the most painfully hesitant expression in the world, a look that simply did not convince her, and even irritated her a little. -- Always referring to a vague "People's Government" (she would say); issuing a vigorous barrage of new wage incentives, tax moratoriums for domestic investors, import tariffs and visa abolition for tourists. Welcome, only to the Israeli experts on irrigation and world security and other badly needed political promiscuities. But not a hint of conciliation. I'm not a child, K. I'm not talking just about love. Those concepts that the human mind has grasped as vaguely as a Braille record. I'm talking about a faint light suspended in the darkness of your palimpsest, redolent of your trusting nature and your unholy energy. The vision of a Madonna under Cuban cigar butts; who else, after all, can take the crystal ball out of this damned web of unfinished works that has taken over the world (??) ------, she said.